Sometimes, a story shares more information and conveys more insights than just spoon feeding people information.  I use Doctrine ORM a lot but was curious what Symfony-based Laravel framework used as a database ORM or if it even used one at all.  After all, in Symfony you can use custom ORM packages but Doctrine works best.  A few commands on the command line can “wire up” so much of your database and basic website functions, entities and CRUD.  I’ve read and seen others use Propel in Symfony just fine, but how does Laravel work?  A good question in case you ever are pulled into a project where the team went Laravel instead of Symfony, perhaps.  It’s always healthy to stay curious in this quick changing industry.

But what about Eloquent — and what exactly is Fluent anyway?!  Well, here’s a great thread and discussion that will lead you to some answers to the these inquisitive questions by some smart, experienced Laravel experts.  Just in case you were wondering, perhaps you were just searching for “anything but procedural code systems.”  If your company is open source and you don’t use Symfony or some other PHP framework, in two or three years you probably will have to if you plan on expanding and growing your web and data infrastructures. Be warned!

– Aaron Belchamber